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Discovering Irishness, Recovering Niceness

David Morse, the only American in the otherwise all-Irish cast of “The Seafarer,” Conor McPherson’s dark and glinting boozefest of a play now on Broadway after an acclaimed run in London, had a choice of roles. When his agent sent him the script, Mr. Morse said, two parts were open: Sharky, an endearing loser who, as his brother says, has “made a pig’s mickey out of everything,” and the sleek and mysterious Mr. Lockhart (now played by Ciaran Hinds, most familiar to many Americans as Caesar in the HBO mini-series “Rome”).

Lockhart, an elegant, humorless fellow who gives off a certain sulfurous whiff, is no less than Satan himself, visiting a Dublin suburb on Christmas Eve to play cards with a foursome of damaged souls in hopes of taking one back through the hole in the wall to Hell. He has some of the best lines in the play, including a memorable, scatological dismissal of an attempt by Sharky’s brother, Richard, to argue the theory of intelligent design.

“That’s such a great part, the Lockhart character,” Mr. Morse said. “Any actor, you just want to be the person saying those words.” But he picked Sharky, a thwarted, internalized character. “I’ve done a lot in films where I’m the character everyone loves to hate,” he said. “For a change I needed to be someone people love to love.”

Mr. Morse, grayer and a little jowlier with the slablike sideburns he has grown to play Sharky, is still recognizable as Dr. Morrison, the baby-faced, sweet-natured resident on the ’80s television series “St. Elsewhere.” He also draws glares on the street these days from people who recognize him as Detective Tritter, the nasty, Javert-like figure who (in a piece of casting surely inspired by medical series in-jokery) turns up periodically on “House” to hound Hugh Laurie.

And in an odd way Mr. Morse’s career has veered between those two poles, between saintly characters and ugly ones. He was the good guy in Sean Penn’s directing debut, “The Indian Runner,” and the bad one in Mr. Penn’s next directing effort, “The Crossing Guard.” In the forthcoming HBO series “John Adams” he’s George Washington, but most recently he was the glowering, murderous next-door neighbor in “Disturbia.”

“I don’t know how deliberate it is,” Mr. Morse said, talking about the kinds of roles he’s played. “These are the things that just came my way. A certain amount is just survival. You have to work.” But after “St. Elsewhere,” he added, he did seek different kinds of parts.

“Coming out of ‘St. Elsewhere’ all I got offered was more ‘St. Elsewhere,’” he said. “More nice guys in television series. And I thought: I’m not going to spend the rest of my life doing this. I’m going to be locked in cement. So I made a point of doing other kinds of things, small roles sometimes, and not worrying about the money. And then, unfortunately, I did a lot of those bad guys, and people started thinking of me that way.”

Photo

David Morse onstage at the Booth Theater, where he plays Sharky in The Seafarer.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

He enjoyed the title role in “Hack” — the television series about an ex-cop turned crime-solving cab driver — because the character, he said, “seemed to be a guy who was straddling both worlds, good and bad, and could tip either way.”

As it happens, Mr. Morse’s history of extremes perfectly suits the part of Sharky. All the characters in “The Seafarer” are voyagers on an ocean of alcohol, but Sharky most nearly resembles the hero of the Anglo-Saxon poem from which the play takes its name, an anguished, solitary figure both cursed and, ultimately, redeemed.

After a failed stint as a chauffeur in County Clare, Sharky is home caring for his peevish, manipulative older brother, Richard, blind from a fall into a trash bin. Trying to quit drinking but picked on by everyone, especially the Devil, Sharky succumbs to a jug of poteen and erupts in a scenery-bashing rage.

“You try not to anticipate it,” Mr. Morse said of the exertion demanded by this section of the play. “Actually you try not to think too much about anything, but that especially.”

Mr. Morse, who shares some of Sharky’s taciturn quality and speaks slowly and after consideration, is also the odd man out in that the rest of the cast — Mr. Hinds, Conleth Hill, Sean Mahon and Jim Norton — consists of Irish stage actors. Mr. Hill and Mr. Norton appeared in the London production of “The Seafarer,” for which Mr. Norton won an Olivier Award, the British equivalent of a Tony.

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“I would sit around rehearsals and listen to all these Irishmen talk,” Mr. Morse said, “and you’d think we’re all talking the same language, but half of it is just going past me. It’s like we’re not all talking English here. Actually it was about two months before I realized, sitting there in the midst of them all, that I’m hearing everything, and that I can’t figure out what’s changed, whether they’ve changed or I have.”

Two months was also how long it took Mr. Morse to become comfortable with his own Irish accent in the play, and it was roughly the time it took him to master George Washington’s accent for the HBO series. “I guess two months is standard for me,” he said, laughing, and added: “People are going to be surprised by what George sounds like. His family were farmers from West England, and that’s a very old, rural accent. For a while I felt that I was in a bad high school performance.”

When it came to learning his brogue, “I thought I knew what an Irish accent was,” he said, “just the way you think you know what a Southern accent is, until you realize that there are about 50 different ones. Sharky’s accent is very, very specific — it’s from one North Dublin neighborhood — and it’s hard to master. I made a point of asking the other guys to correct me.”

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David Morse, center, with the Irishmen Jim Norton, left, and Conleth Hill in The Seafarer.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

He added: “There’s always the pressure of the opening. Much as you try not to think about it, there is always that self-consciousness of wanting everything to be great, including the accent, and just getting past that was a relief. I think we felt just free then, free to go play and not worry about all that stuff, and that’s when the accent started clicking in for me.”

The three-week stagehands’ strike happened just as the play was about to be reviewed, and that too proved beneficial, he said. “The strike happened just as we felt we were about to peak,” he said, “and we didn’t want to lose that, whatever connection we had with each other.”

So every day, after signing in at the theater, the actors would get together in a room — usually someone’s office — and sit around talking. They even read aloud a play, Sean O’Casey’s “Juno and the Paycock.”

“That period helped us all relax,” Mr. Morse said. “It took all the pressure off trying to make this perfect thing happen.” These meetings were all business, he added, with no elbow-bending, even though it could have been argued that a drink or two would have been entirely in keeping with the play. Mr. Morse smiled and said, “There might have been some imbibing afterward.”

Mr. Morse, now 54, began acting professionally at 17. He was a dismal student whose main pleasure was reading plays, and the day after he graduated from high school he hitchhiked from the North Shore in Boston, where he grew up, to join a repertory company on Cape Cod.

It was “St. Elsewhere” that put him on the map after a promising debut in the Richard Donner film “Inside Moves,” and though his “St. Elsewhere” memories are not entirely happy — it was a writers’ show, he said, and somewhat bullying to actors — among alumni of the series he has fared pretty well. He is not a superstar on the order of Denzel Washington, but neither is he a game-show host like Howie Mandel.

“The Seafarer” is Mr. Morse’s first stage role since the Pulitzer Prize-winning “How I Learned to Drive,” for which he won an Obie in 1997. (In that one he played both extremes at once: a child molester who is actually sympathetic.) But his absence from the stage, he said, has had less to do with resistance than with logistics. A play typically means more time away from his family — his wife and three children, who live in Philadelphia — than a movie does. But when “The Seafarer” came along, it was hard to say no.

“There was the chance to work with these guys,” he said, “and then the play had already been a great success in London, which meant it would come right to Broadway without an out-of-town tryout. It had a lot going for it even before it arrived in the mail.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Discovering Irishness, Recovering Niceness. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe